The technology enables the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a different location.
At the same time, the human participant, in a virtual environment, interacts with a human-sized avatar that is controlled by the movements of the distant rat.
The human participants in the system were in a virtual reality lab at the Mundet campus of the University of Barcelona.
The rat was located around 12 km away in an animal care facility in Bellvitge.
Researchers hope the new technology will be used to study animal behaviour in a completely new way.
Computer scientists at University College London (UCL) and the University of Barcelona have been working on the idea of 'beaming' for some time now, having digitally beamed a scientist in Barcelona to London to be interviewed by a journalist last year.
Researchers define 'beaming' as digitally transporting a representation of yourself to a distant place, where you can interact with the people there as if you were there.
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This is achieved through a combination of virtual reality and teleoperator systems. The visitor to the remote place (the destination) is represented there ideally by a physical robot.
Tracking technology was used to track the movements of the rat in its arena, and the tracking data was transmitted over the internet to the computers running the virtual reality simulation in Mundet.
This tracking information was used to control a virtual human character (an avatar) that represented the rat so that whenever the rat moved its avatar moved too, in a representation of the rat arena but scaled up to human size.
Whenever the human moved in the virtual space the robot moved in the rat space.
"Beaming is a step beyond approaches such as video conferencing which do not give participants the physical sensation of being in the same shared space, and certainly not the physical capability to actually carry out actions in that space," researcher Mandayam Srinivasan said.